A parent’s take on diagnosis

Autism diagnoses only really became an option for children in the last few decades and for adults even more recently than that. In recent years there’s been an massive increase in diagnoses for all ages and genders – which is a big improvement from the perception that it was only something that applied to young boys. It’s not that autism has become more prevalent – it’s that society has got better at acknowledging that it exists. More and more people are coming to understand why it is that they may have struggled at work and with socialising. Having spent a significant portion of their brain all their lives trying to manage and conceal undiagnosed autism, they had less left than other people for doing work and life stuff.

Reasonable Adjustment Passport Suggestions

A “Reasonable Adjustment Passport” is something a disabled worker can take with them between jobs telling their manager what adjustments they are likely to need or may find helpful. This post is provides some suggestions of things managers could be asked to do in a reasonable adjustment passport, based on regular guest posters AP’s, which they have kindly agreed to share. There’s a huge range of possible reasonable adjustments for autism and not every autistic person will need the same things. The thing about reasonable adjustments is of course that they have to be reasonable, and if they’re too disruptive, or difficult, or unrealistic, you may not get them. But you can ask. AP sets out some things that they ask of managers to see what they think

Reasonable Adjustment Passports

Have you heard of a “Reasonable Adjustment Passport”? It’s something a disabled worker can take with them between jobs telling their manager what adjustments they are likely to need or may find helpful. There’s a huge range of possible reasonable adjustments for autism and not every autistic person will need the same things. Equally, many managers don’t know much about autism, so a bit of explanation can be very helpful to them.

This post is based on regular guest posters AP’s Reasonable Adjustments Passport which they have kindly agreed to share. It’s extremely well written and any autistic person might benefit from having something like this.

Translating out of “autistic”

My colleague AP has very kindly written a guest post, reflecting on this very struggle – how to translate out of “autistic” and in doing so, how much detail do you actually need to keep? They write:

For autistic people, communication is often an exercise in translation. Learning how to have conversations is often best compared to learning a foreign language, due to the similarities around learning common phrases and differences in social norms. Imagine if you were going to a meeting in a foreign country – would you know with certainty how to behave in that environment and what social norms that country will expect you to meet?

Burn out and not posting today…

Autistic burnout is common among autistic people; it can creep up on us subtly, or arrive suddenly and be totally debilitating. It affects not only energy and mental health, but also ability to communicate and can leave an autistic person feeling overwhelmed, exhausted, and disconnected. Having tried both, I can say it has some aspects in common with depression, particularly the disconnection bit. Autistic burnout can be caused by workload, unfairness, lack of control and other things that we autistic people are particularly prone to. I’m a total workaholic myself feeling I need constantly to justify my existence. So I’m always going to be at risk of autistic burn out through over-conscientiousness.

More than one person

The Coronation tomorrow is going to be very much about the two people – the King and Queen Consort – at the centre of proceedings. But an absolutely vast number of other people have been and will be involved. Being a figurehead is all very well, and all nations need one, whether a monarch or a president or something else. But really almost nothing is actually about the figurehead so much as the group as a whole. One person may appear to take credit – by being crowned or just by having their name on a piece of work – but nothing really stands alone. Self-promotion in the professional world means saying “I did this” but for an honest and literal minded autistic it’s almost impossible.

Workshops on Worker’s Day

Today – 1 May – is the international worker’s day holiday so it seems an ideal moment for a blog on workshops. It’s written by a colleague of mine who has a real gift for organising and running these, using their autistic strengths to get the most out of everything. AP is a highly gifted civil servant who has previously helped me out with blogs providing content for A Day in the Life and the theme for Autistic Canary in the Coal Mine.

AP is an autistic HEO (= civil service junior manager) and has been running a sequence of large workshops.  This is what they have to say about it…

A Day in the Life

I came across a great blog by the Department for Transport (DfT) Neurodiversity Network and they kindly allowed me to draw from it to give an overview of what daily life is like for a range of autistic colleagues. It’s an opportunity to offer a spread of experiences rather than just mine, although I’ve woven my own experiences in as well. I think it really illustrates how each autistic person is different but there are some themes that run through our existences to do with sensory stress, and the need for control of what’s going on in order to cope.